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Sunday, 28 September 2014

So it seems that after all
that kerfuffle,I won’t now be able to
apply for my Scottish passport.My
father was born and raised in Glasgow and that meant that I would have been
eligible for one.But we’ve had our
nationally televised Great British Break Off – and it’s not to be.

I remember that word ‘kerfuffle’ from my
childhood, from when I was a ‘wee lad’. I heard it a lot growing up, and I
suppose I always thought it was Yiddish: it often went with that other word
that described those who were involved in kerfuffles: ‘meshuggenahs’. So my mistake isn’t that surprising. Actually it’s
Scottish, ‘kerfuffle’, meaning‘disorder/agitation’ – but it’s in every dictionary of the English
language, or should we say ‘British’ language, as an informal wordfor ‘fuss’ or ‘commotion’. But in its onomatopoeic
weirdness ‘kerfuffle’ is so much more
evocative to my ear than those very ‘English’ words. Kerfuffle: a concocted, fluffed up argument over trifles...

It’s quite common in
childhood to grow up with a mishmash of languages in our head – I’m sure I
absorbed lots of words from my parents, from family, from school, as well as
from what I read; nowadays it’s also from globalised TV programmes and music.
We are all internationalists in our speech, in our everyday talking, we are all
speaking hybrid sentences all the time. ‘Mishmash’ – you hear it every day from
BBC correspondents and Eton-educated man-of-the-people politicians – it’s come
into so-called ‘English’ via Yiddish from the Middle High German. I even heard
Nigel Farage use it. None of us are national purists when it comes to how we
talk.

When it comes to language we
can see what a strange concept nationalism is, how artificial a construct it is
– however rigorously we try to police the boundaries and borders of our
national language, immigrant words just creep in, or are smuggled in, even when
they are not actively embraced in acts of colonisation: pyjamas, juggernaut,
loot, bungalow, cot, cushy - even dear old ‘Blighty’.And you can’t get a more British word than
that Hindi expression. We’re all mongrels when we talk.

Hebrew is the same – not just
modern Hebrew , Ivrit, the most
successful language revitalisation project in history, a revival led by Eliezer
ben-Yehudah at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the
20th century which took Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew and grafted
into it Yiddish, Polish, English, German, Ladino and Arabic words – amongst
others – to create a new language for a new nation-state, which has had to keep
adding words as the years have gone by: so you have to use your intuitzia to sort out the informatzia you get from the televisia, for example,because the compozitzia of a proportzia of
it is - how to say it? – trivia.

You can never keep the field
of language free from cross-fertilisation from alien imports. The wind of
trans-national communication blows – like the divine spirit, the ruach Elohim fluttering over the face of
the deep – and the seeds of language drift across boundaries and regenerate
languages, keeping them creatively alive and fertile resources for us to use
and misuse. Miscegenation is the norm, the name of the game.

It’s not just modern Hebrew.
Classical Hebrew too is polyglot: God might have dictated the Torahto Moses word by word, but if so then Ha-Kadosh Baruch Hu was quite a
linguist: maybe it was just His wicked sense of humour but something was going
on when He decided to use a foreign word, in fact several foreign words, as
names for Himself: El, El Elyon, El Shaddai, all derive from pre-HebraicCanaanite and Ugaratic words for various
gods. And the decision to call His people Yisrael
was just inspired: you can still hear the old Canaanite god El planted within the name of our
people, idling away, as if to subvert any atavistic wish for Jewish ethnic
purity for ‘our people’. Whenever we say Israel, Yisrael, we are reminding ourselves – if we have ears to hear –
that ‘otherness’ is part of us, innately.

The Jewish people have
inherited a name – Israel/Yisrael -
that is both a religious identity and now, latterly, the name of a state. But
both echo with this subversive reminder that our membership of Klal Yisrael, the community of Israel,
includes parts of the past we might have thought we’ve left behind.Being a Jew means being a hybrid – there’s no
escape. We’ve always been taking from and reacting against the non-Jewish
worlds we lived in. Our Jewish psyches are like an archaeological site, layered
by history: dig inside us and we find the triumphs and tragedies of bygone
years, the pride and the fears, traces of all the cultures we lived in over the
generations: where do you think we got hamentaschen from on Purim, or
cheesecake on Shavuot, or twisted challah on Shabbat? We took them over from
the cultures we lived in and made them our own. Like El in Yisrael.

Our souls are like a cliff
face open to the elements and revealing the variegated strata of centuries, and
geologists of the psyche can rejoice in seeing how we are filled with impure
mixtures of Ashkenazi sediments and Sephardi fossils and Islamic and Christian
and pagan minerals. Whether Jews by choice or Jews by fate, you join your own
story to that of Israel/ Yisrael –
and that identity, (with the old Canaanite god El lurking in the background) is
gloriously impure, mongrel, rich in the blessings of multiplicity rather than
the one-dimensional fanaticism that attaches itself to notions of purity.

Jews above all should know
the importance of this theme of the hybrid - because we have been the victims
of a mentality that believed the opposite, that a people’s culture was and
should be mono-dimensional, monolithic: ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich,
ein Führer’ (one people,
one nation, one leader) – that was the fantasy of ethnic purity and we know
where it led, and where it still leads. And I am not alone in detecting it in
some of the more extreme voices in the Knesset and the West Bank. And when we
hear it we must call it by its name. From the depths of our multi-layered
mongrel Jewish souls we call into question, call to task, fantasies of national
or ethnic purity.

This hybridity is threaded
through the Jewish story from the earliest times, and it operates on the
fundamentallevel of language, as I’ve
said, as well as within the stories of the tradition – remember that mixed multitude
of people who left Egypt along with the Hebrew people and lived and
journeyedwith them and had children
with them and produced the next generations of Israel through that 40 years of
desert wandering? A story that tells us, just as an aside, that Moses married
Zipporah, daughter of a Midianite priest. It’s as if the storytellers want to
keep reminding us that ethnic purity is a fantasy. That we are all hybrids.

And nationalism, like
religious ideology, can become an elaborate and sometimes, tragically, deadly
serious game to hide this discomforting fact of life. Our world is filled with
death-dealing in the name of nationalism, which becomes even more toxic when
laced with religion – the Middle East is full of it self-evidently, and Russia
and Ukraine come to mind, but they are only the tip of the iceberg - which is
why for me, to return to the referendum, although I could see the emotional
appeal of independence and Scottish nationalism, I am very happy still to be
living in this ramshackle disordered disunited kingdom which is larger than the
sum of its parts.

Perhaps part of what makes
Britain ‘Great’ – in an era when that ‘greatness’ is much diminished, and much
derided too in some parts (and I have some sympathy with critiques of our
‘Greatness’)– but what makes it Great,
I think, is that it implicitly recognises that these islands are home to many
peoples, many tribes, and always have been: we are a cobbled-together nation
that’s been able, historically, to absorb others - not just their languages,
but their peoples, newcomers, immigrants, asylum seekers, century after century
of them, including my Polish-born grandfather who found himself in Glasgow when
he got off the boat – though I’m not sure he knew it has heading there.

It was morefor him a case, as for so many in those
decades, of : we are just journeying ‘Away from Here. Away From Here: that is
our destination’; ‘Away from Here’, Kafka’s words resonating into our
contemporary world, when so many peoples from so many lands where there is
ethnic strife and war and deprivation and hardship are making that perilous
journey from fraught homelands towards the uncertain fate of a new life, ‘Away
from Here’. And that our shambolic disunited kingdom can still welcome people
of so many diverse lands and backgrounds and cultures is what confirms (if
anything does any longer) this nation’s entitlement to still call itself ‘Great’.

But we Jews are going to have
to fight for that, if we retain any belief in the importance of the notion of
offering havens for the persecuted. We say it over and over, in the Torah, and
in sermons you’ll have heard ad nausea: ‘we have been strangers’ - so it is our duty,
it is incumbent on us, to welcome the stranger. And if we have no vote when it
comes to how our co-religionists do this in Israel, which is a whole other
story, we do have a vote and a voice when it comes to this country. And this
year we have an election coming up and we are going to be beaten over the head
with the narrowing down, anti-immigrant, anti-European UKIP narrative, and
other parties will tack to the foul winds blowing from that direction.

It’s at the New Year, in our
liturgy, that we are exposed to this extraordinary part of the Jewish mythic
narrative that says ‘This day all who enter the world pass before You...and you
record, and count, and consider them’ :what their fate, their life, will be in the year ahead. God is pictured
as determining the destiny of every creature - that means Jews and non-Jews
alike. This is part of the breathtaking chutzpah of Jewish life at this time of
the year: we say, unashamedly, brazenly,that the world revolves around us, what we do, what we fail to do, how
we live, what vision we uphold, what vision we betray. The divine is involved, this
story says, through the choices we make: our lives, and other people’s lives,
are bound up with the process of reflection and prayer and renewed
determination to live in certain ways, with particular ethical values, and with
a morality congruent with our tradition. Questions of life and death, of who
will live and who will die, are not only (of course) in our hands – but they
are also in our hands. That’s the radical, discomforting claim of our
tradition.

When I hear politicians of
any kind trying to defend ethnic or national exclusivity – whether it is in
Israel or in the UK – it’s then that I recognise the pluralism of identity in
me. And how calls to promote an ‘us’ against a ‘them’ are OK for those who
follow sport,when it is literally a
game - but are not OK when they are talking about the complexity of human
beings.

You see, when I think about
my own identity, part of me is British, and I enjoy that, my passport affirms
it and there is a deep history behind that, much larger and richer than the
relatively few generations my family has been here. And part of me is English –
it wasn’t Britain whom I watched in 1966winning the World Cup, it was the nation of William Blake and Turner and
Jane Austen and Bobby Charlton. And part of me is a Mancunian and a Lancastrian
who still feels connected to my roots in the north and finds southerners, North
West Londoners, sometimes rather insular metropolitans living in a kind of
bubble. And part of me is connected to my Scottish roots - but also to my
mother’s hometown in the north-east, Sunderland. They are all parts of who I am
- along with my sense of myself as a man with all the burdens and advantages
that that brings; and a father; and a husband; and of course there’s my
identity as a Jew, that’s close to the heart of me, but it sits alongside those
other aspects of my hybrid self.

And as a Jew that means for
me, inevitably through history and ‘elective affinities’ as Goethe called them,
I’m a European in my guts, my kishkes;
Europe - that trans-national disputed entity that I celebrate because it is
larger than nationalism: sothere are
textures of German culture, and French, and Polish, and Russian, that
contribute to the tapestry of who I am, who I am in my hybrid Jewish self.

It’s why Dostoevsky speaks to
me as much as, probably more than, Dickens. Kafka and Kierkegaard – Czech and
Danish, Jew and Christian – seem to offer me a larger vision than the
horizon-limiting Englishness of someone like Hilary Mantel, however lively and
popular her prose. The broader perspective trumps the smaller one. “I am large,
I contain multitudes” – that’s Walt Whitman, an American through and through.
But still a sensibility I integrate into my own. What I’m trying to talk about
here isn’t just about my personal identity; it’s, for want of a better
word,though I’m rather shy about
calling it that, a moral position - it’s about seeing ourselves as bigger than
the boxes our leaders, political or religious, want to put us in, broader in
our horizons than national or ethnic cultures promote with their fantasies of
superiority. I’m talking about trying to move away from the provincialism of
national boundaries and tribal exclusiveness, working towards a sense of self
that rejects a narrowing down, that is open to the global, the international.

And we need to be bigger than
the national, than the tribal, than the ethnic, because the problems we face in
this world are bigger than any nation can manage, any single nation can bear.
The future of our planet is on the line, climate change is no respecter of
national boundaries, and it’s laughable to think of nations protecting their
own interests, their own businesses, their own economies, in the face of this
trans-national challenge.

It’s like children protecting
their own sandcastles against the advancing tide: ‘I’m the king of the castle,
and you’re a dirty rascal’. We really have to grow up. That’s why for me, as a
Jew, rooted in my own particular religious identity, I have to be an
internationalist, I have to support the notion of being fully part of Europe,
and the value of world bodies like the United Nations (whatever its faults) – I
have to see the issues of the day through that extraordinary vision of the
Hebrew Bible where we are given a divine voice that speaks the words of a
universalistic vision from the midst of its particularism: “The Eternal One
called to Moses out of the mountain, saying, “Thus you shall say to the house
of Jacob, and tell the people of Israel: You yourselves have seen what I did
... if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my
treasured possession among all peoples, because
the whole earth is mine.”
(Exodus 19:5). “For Mine is the land – and you are but resident aliens with Me”
(Leviticus 25:23). “The earth is the Lord’s and all who are in it, the world
and all who live in it” (Psalm 24). There’s never been a time in human history
when this universalistic vision within Judaism has been more urgent.

That’s part of why I’m so resistant to those
appeals to the Jewish community- from
the Jewish Chronicle or the CST (our unelected, unrepresentative,
self-appointed guardians) to retreat behind the barricades of our tribal
ghettoes, retreat in fear from that bigger world which we belong to, and have
so much to contribute to. Yes, there are people who don’t like us, but they
might like us more if we were more open, more able to articulate a larger
vision, more able to say that Jewishness is not only about self-preservation,
and protecting our own narrow interests,but it’s about upholding certain values: of concern for the underdog,
embrace of the outsider, empathy for the deprived and the dispossessed, care
for those cast aside by the relentless march of globalised capitalism with its
disregard for individual well-being. Judaism is about a passion for
righteousness and a hunger for justice. It’s not inward-looking, it’s about
something larger than us.

When we cling to tribe, and nation, it’s because
we are scared. ‘The whole world is a very narrow bridge’ – yes, Nachman of
Bratslav is right – ‘but the essential thing’, he says, ha-ikkar, ‘is not to be afraid, at all’.lo-lefached klal. Let’s approach this New Year without fear, with hope, with belief,
with the knowledge that our vision, our large Jewish vision, will support us,
and sustain us, and can make the world a better place. Kayn yehi ratzon-
may this be God’s will.

[slightly expanded from a sermon given on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, Jewish New Year, September 26th, 2014]

Sunday, 14 September 2014

"I have
of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth” – Hamlet is
responding to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. His friends are wondering why he is
so morose.And Hamlet goes on to
describe how the world, and the people in it, can be viewed – but also his struggle to hold on to his optimism
and delight with it all.

“What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action
how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!... and yet, to me, what is
this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me – nor woman neither...”

Over the last few years I
have been utilising some literary texts - King
Lear,Beckett’s Waiting for Godot – as a way of approaching some of the themes of
the New Year. This year Hamlet is my
jumping off point - though I mused on opting, topically, for ‘the Scottish
play’, Macbeth – ‘Present fears/are
less than horrible imaginings...what’s done cannot be undone...’But wherever we start, I feel we need all the
help we can get.And this year more than
ever.

Because we’ve taken a
battering over the year. Not only the personal stuff that afflicts us year in
year out: illnesses, deaths, losses of various kinds, failures and frustrations
and disappointments – all the stuff of daily life that we have to contend with,
that cast shadows over our sense of well-being, that dent our optimism, that
threaten to diminish our pleasure in life. That cause us to ‘lose all our
mirth’. Stuff that reminds us of our fragility, our vulnerability, our
mortality. And how our sense of meaning and purpose and the goodness of life is
easily shaken. We are all at risk in the world.And at this time of the year Judaism cajoles us into returning to this
densely-textured stuff of daily life and reflecting on it.

But this year, in addition,
we’ve had to contend with some larger themes: about Israel and the anguish of
war, again; and deaths again, deaths of ‘us’ and deaths of ‘them’; and all
thatwondering about the need for it,
the needlessness of it, our helplessness in it, struggling to find a response
to the threats and the suffering that isn’t a cry of anguish – or struggling to
find a worthwhile response along with a cry of anguish.

And then realising that it’s
not just about a struggle ‘over there’, but that it spills over into here - our streets, our homes - with questions that
we feel stirring within us, as we wonder about our security, people feeling
threatened as Jews – though in truth there’s little real evidence for it, but a
spurious Jewish Chronicle scare-mongering survey taps precisely into the Jewish
nervous system, historical and atavistic, that many Jews carry deep within
them.

We are actually living
through a golden age of Jewish life in the UK – its vitality is amazing, there
seems to be a Limmud every other week somewhere up and down the country, Jewish
cultural life like we’ve not seen before, Jewish schools and restaurants
opening and filled up, many synagogues are booming (OK, maybe not so much in
the provinces), but charities and grassroots Jewish organisations, secular and
religious, are flourishing, there’s music and books and arts and film
festivals– what a time to be Jewish
here in the UK.

But that visceral old anxiety
creeps in, has crept in, over this last year, to various degrees: ‘I have of
late...lost all my mirth’; and these gnawing anxieties, personal or communal,
become part of what we suffer from, part of what goes into this picture of
where we are now, part of what diminishes our capacity to enjoy the daily
blessings of life, which are manifold.

So this is where we are, as
we return to our tradition, and a time in our calendar (Selichot) that asks us
once more to reflect back on where we have been this last year, what we have
done, and not done, what we have felt, and not felt, what we have achieved and
what we have failed to achieve. It brings us back to ourselves: “What a piece of work is man” – yes, it
is awesome (awe-inspiring and sometimes awful) to reflect on our humanity, our
complexity.

We are ‘pieces of work’ –
Shakespeare’s text is a kind of secular midrash on Psalm 8, which talks of
human beings as aspects of God’s ‘handiwork’. What an extraordinary idea! What
would it mean to live, to really live, fully alive to, alert to, being part of
God’s handiwork in the world? Perhaps it’s too painful to keep ourselves aware
that we are woven into the divine filigree of all creation? Each one of us.
Each saint and sinner amongst us. Each frightened Israeli teenage soldier; each
terrified Palestinian child. ‘What a piece of work is man.’

“How noble in reason” – part of our nobility is that we have minds that can
think, that can reason, that can discriminate between good and evil (at least
theoretically), that can acknowledge that we are not only a prey to
emotionality and knee-jerk reactions, that we – unlike all other parts of God’s
handiwork – can reflect on our experiences, can reflect on our place in the
scheme of things, can dream of better worlds, can build better worlds. ‘What a
piece of work is man; how noble in reason’.

“How infinite in faculties”: yes, we are capable of love and compassion and
generosity and self-sacrifice – these are our faculties of heart and soul. This
is also what it means to be part of God’s handiwork – to have a ever-renewable
wellspring of moral instincts within us. And at this time of the year we are
called to return to them, to stir them up again within us, to find the courage
to live them, these divine facultiesgrafted to our souls.

“How infinite in faculties...in action how like an
angel” – well, this Bard knows how to
flatter us, comparing us to angels. Just like the Psalmist does, back in Psalm
8: ‘You have made humankind just a little less than the angels’. Here is poetry
to seduce us into thinking the best of ourselves, and our potential: that we
are created with an ability to join our thinking, our reasoning, our mental
capacities, with our moral imagination, and our ethical faculties, so that they
flow, we flow, into action : ‘in action how like an angel’. Like the Psalmist’s
religious vision, Shakespeare’s humanismsees us, reminds us, that we are the messengers of the Divine on earth.

“In apprehension how like a god” – ‘apprehension’ as in ‘powers of understanding’. It’s
an amazingly elevated view of humanity from Hamlet’s creator, allowing himself
the freedom, as does the Psalmist, to celebrate our special status in God’s
creation, as the pinnacle of creation. We are god-like in our powers of
perception, in the depth with which we can
understand things, in the heights to which we can aspire, in the breadth of what we can achieve. It’s good to be reminded of this. It underlies the
whole of the High Holy Days, which remind us over and over again, what we are
capable of as human beings – even if we fail at it, over and again, this task
of living true to our better selves.

And then, just when our minds
and hearts are bursting with these glimpses of who we are and what our
potential is, Shakespeare turns Hamlet’s paean of praise for humanity on its
head: ‘and yet, to me, what is this
quintessence of dust? Man delights not me – nor woman neither...’ The
bubble of human glory and potential is burst. Like a kick in the teeth. Because
the other side of the story - and it goes back to the mythic opening of Genesis
- is that ‘Man’, Adam, Humanity is dust. Adam,
‘The Human’, from Adamah, the ground,
the earth: in Hebrew our generic name is always reminding us of how lowly we
are. We might be ‘little lower than the angels’, but we are still creatures of
flesh and blood who are as fragile as dust, as fleeting as the flowers of the
morning that wither in the evening, as transient as shadows, as dreams that
fade and die, a cup so easily broken – all the images of this New Year period flood
back to remind us of our mortality, and the tentative, tentative hold we have
on our earthly lives.

Here’s Shakespeare’s genius.
Hamlet’s low mood, his melancholy, comes not because of his awareness of the
double-sidedness of life – our god-like nobility in tension with our dust-like
transience and insignificance. This is wisdom - to appreciate this
double-sidedness. But his mood comes from his inability, his failure, to find
in himself any delight in the people around him. ‘And yet, to me, what is this
quintessence of dust? Man delights not me
– nor woman neither...’ Me, me, me – this is Hamlet, a thoroughly
contemporary sensibility. Cut off from his capacity to take pleasure from the
world, and to enjoy other people. He’s lost in his own narrow world of
feelings. He’s stuck in the gap between his head and his heart. Even though he
knows that the people around him are wondrous – he can’t relate to them.
There’s no delight to be had in the company of others, men or women, no
emotional or physical contact will do it, nothing can breathe life into his
relationships.

It is a terrible thing to be
stuck in that place. It can happen to any of us. It does happen to all of us,
from time to time. We just hope and pray we don’t get too stuck in that place
personally. It’s terrible when it happens individually - but more terrible
perhaps (and we have seen it over and over in this last 12 months) is when this
happens collectively, politically, when there’s a radical failure in one group
of people to see the living, breathing humanity and vitality of another group:
it’s in the Middle East, all over; in Ukraine and Russia, in Africa, in the
ugly recesses of racism here, or in the rest of Europe. The curse of Hamlet –
being cut off from a vibrant, living, life-affirming connection to those
amongst whom we live.

The High Holy Days give us
the time to re-connect: with others, with our better selves, with our deepest
values, with our tradition of reflection and hope and its vision of change, that we can change. Time to remember
that – in ways we only glimpse out of the corner of an eye, if at all – the
world depends on our changing, our teshuvah,
our turning and returning. What’s always stressed at this time of the year is
that it is a personal journey we make through these days. And that’s true. But for
those of us who choose to do so, they are also days we share with others, with
community. And we can take pleasure in that. We are not alone. We have our own
unique experience of these days, of course- but we are not alone.

For those who engage in the
mythic narrative of Judaism, we share something over these days, over these
weeks. There is great solidarity in this, to journey as a people. If we are
feeling we have ‘lost our mirth’, lost our capacity for delight, then we can
look around us, look at what a piece of work our neighbour is: filled with
hope, like us, and anxiety, like us, filled with nobility, like us, with
doubts, like us. We are in this together. I hope it is a good New Year for all
of us, Jew and non-Jew alike.

[based on a sermon at the Selichot service Finchley Reform Synagogue, September 13th 2014]